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What Does Nike Want?

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Not too long ago writer and tech enthusiast Kevin Kelly2 told us that technology is the 7th Kingdom of life, evolutionarily speaking. As many theories come to be, Kelly arrived at this one by first locating an instrumental question: what does technology want?

Not meant to imply a human type of “answering,” this question served as an investigative tool that helped Kelly look at technology through an evolutionary lens in order to determine its “wants.” Such long-term analysis revealed that technology has tendencies toward the same evolutionary goals as living organisms, i.e., ubiquity, diversity, specialization, complexity, and socialization. Thus, insofar as technology shows similar tendencies and patterns as organisms, technology can be seen as the 7th Kingdom of life.

The key to any evolutionary methodology is “long-term,” that is, to take a span of time long enough that allows for a tracing of mutation, as well as a mapping of environmental fluctuations that activate such changes.

Manuel De Landa, whose philosophy addresses scientific and cultural concerns, grounds his thinking on dynamic systems theory in order to show that there are inherent structures to our reality. According to De Landa, our reality can be explained through emergent patterns and structures, that “everything from the static on a telephone line to the formation of mountains to the fluctuations of stock markets displays deep structural patterns and tendencies (attractors).”3 Thus, “it is these patterns that give rise to the myriad shapes and events of reality.”4 Emergences such as technology, which were previously thought of as “seemingly random forms and events in life,”5 follow these inherent patterns.

And so we arrive at the question that is important to us, what do brands want?

“Right now I’m developing my own brand. The brand is developing a brand. So my brand is a development of developing brands.” – Akeem Smith

Brands share the same evolutionary goals as organisms, that is, to succeed. Success means a standing-out in competition above other species (brand-species) in order to guarantee continuance over time. For brands, this is achieved through attraction, an intelligent sorting of sophisticated semiotic coding that responds to social, economic, and political environments in order to evoke human interest.

Today, brands are becoming evermore-complex organisms; each successful brand is a truly evolved animal, and as such has the same drive toward ubiquity, diversity, specialization, complexity, and socialization. One need only look at the history of a well-known brand such as Nike to see morphogenetic-like changes taking place. With time, and as long as Nike continues to garner attention above other brands, we will be able to trace more genealogical transformations in the appearance of their branding and logos.

To the extent that branding is a type of coding that adapts according to its social, political economic, as well as semiotic environments, advertising has evolved in parallel to the field of art. Except for one major difference: advertising has incorporated evolutionary psychology into the construction and interpretation of codes, whereas the field of art, for the most part, has not. As scientist and professor Robert Sapolsky explains, “meaning” is a circumstance of the deep interconnections between our physiology as well as our thoughts and memories and their capacity to influence each other.6 Advertising understands that attraction occurs in connection to environmental and semiotic climates as well as physiological human responses.

Misunderstood by the critical art sector as the total corporate instrumentalization of human physiological responses, the field of advertising continues to be disavowed from having any “critical” potential. Yet in a world where the language of advertising is becoming evermore sophisticated and ubiquitous, it seems almost pathological for art to continue to disregard its presence. Why should the emergent system of signs known as art escape the grasps of a more expansive material ontology?

Art students wanting to find their “thing” or artists who instinctively “brand” themselves, reveal the function of art that is overlooked – that art, like advertising, is attention-seeking. Artists, like brands, are (and have always been), in competition with each other. The role of the artists is one who seeks to “raise the benefit of his/her compositional effort through recombining existing solutions in new ways.”7 In other words, artists, have the same evolutionary drives as branding, that is, to navigate social, political, economic, semiotic as well as material environments, and in order to present the most successful coding that will evoke the highest attention, and thus, guarantee its endurance over time.

Analytic methods in the art field have for too long been concerned with solely conceptual tenets of signification and subjectification8 with disregard for the material connections to which art, as all other things in our world, belong. Professor Sapolsky argues, the task is not to take up one single methodology but to think of each method as a temporary platform that is simply the “most convenient way to describing the outcome of everything that came beforehand.” Similarly, to understand art today, we must take into account conceptual and semiotic histories as well as human physiology, millennia and evolution.

Artists such as Katja Novitskova, and Timur Si-Qin, and DIS, among many others, are already conceiving of art as attention-earning. No longer indebted to the plights of previous generations their work opens up potentials for a new art discourse based on these tenets. This is the new task for art criticism.


  1. I thank Katja Novitskova and Timur Si-Qin for their generous insights on the topics of this essay.
  2. Kevin Kelly on how technology evolves (Ted Talk November 2006).
  3. Timur Si-Qin, “Metamaterialism,” 2011.
  4. Timur Si-Qin.
  5. Timur Si-Qin.
  6. Lecture at Stanford by professor Robert Sapolsky on Human Behavioral Biology (March 29, 2010).
  7. Brian Boyd, On The Origin Of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction, Harvard Press, 2009
  8. Elizabeth Grosz. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth.

Competing Images

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At the invitation of curator Agatha Wara, DIS went to the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard to shoot Katja Novitskova and Timur Si-Qin's exhibition. These images are a continuation of DIS's exploration into new ways of documenting art.

Credits

Photos by Marco Roso and Lauren Boyle
Artwork Katja Novitskova and Timur Si-Qin
Featuring Freeman Hamilton, Lucian B. Wintrich, Becca Van Kollenburg, Keenan Houser, Julian Letton, Nora Delighter, Emma McCann, Danielle Sinay, Janine Rosen, Rose Mori, Ethan Rose, Tschabalala Self
Special Thanks Agatha Wara and Freeman Hamilton

Art School Class Portraits

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Pratt Institute

Pratt Institute MFA students: Jean Paul Gomez, Raul Hott, Macklen Mayse, Deshawn Dumas, Nick Naber, Hiba Schahbaz, Anthony Palocci Jr, Kelly McCafferty, Sheena Rae Dowling.

Hunter

Hunter MFA students: Brandon Mathis, Rotem Liniel, Nate Carey, Patricia Dominguez, Reiko Hamano, Maureen St. Vincent, Seung Huh, and Kevin Kelly.

Parsons

Parsons The New School of Design BFA students: Vicki Thai, Jeanie Choi, Jasmin Chun, Fianny Martinez, Elli Trier, Tyreek Deveaux, Camilo Godoy, Natalie Eichengreen, Justin Wolf, Kolbrun Thora Love, and Malcolm King.

Yale

Yale MFA students: Kenya Robinson, Michael Marcelle, Tommy Kha, Marzena Abrahamik, Sarah Muehlbauer, and Justin Schmitz.

City College

City College BFA students: Abayomi, Travis Feldman, Genghis Lopez, Kristin Amezquita, Kazuhide Kosugi, Jeff, Samuel Innocent, Chris Toro, Robin Charles, Melissa Cabrera, and James King.

NYU

NYU Steinhardt MFA students: Chason Matthams, Davida Fraya Newman, Lily Stockman, Elliott Wright, Lee Perillo, Sarah Feehily, Sam McKinniss, Joseph Imhauser, and Michelle Young Lee.

NYU Tisch BFA students: Candace Shankel, Brittany Bell, Kevin Matthews, Issac Green, Mark Jenkinson (teacher), Aileen Mitchell, Maddy Boardman, Kathryn Heimsath, Cloe Daneshgar, Lebeau, Ariel, and Quetzal Maucci.

NYU Tisch BFA students: Maureen Dai, Jackson Krule, Ruoyi Jiang, Rachel Williams, Tess Sager, Andres Galvan, Evan Smith, and Megan Hilliard.

The Sears Class Portraits by Michael Smith

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The Sears Class Portraits is a ongoing photographic series I started in 1999 and continues every semester I am teaching at the University. Together with my students I go to the local Sears and sit for a group portrait arranged by the in-house photographer.

I ask them to wear their Sunday’s best, however if this is too difficult for them to manage, they are welcome to wear their normal everyday attire. The project is a not only a chronicling of my aging as I get older and the students stay the same age, it’s also a good way to fill up a class period. All the students seem to look forward to their field trip to Sears. All I ask of them is to sit and smile for the portrait and then they are free to work with the photographer art directing their own pictures. In exchange for participating in the photo sessions each student receives a wallet size class portrait and a cd of the entire session.

— Michael Smith

Class of Fall 1999

Class of Fall 2002

Class of Spring 2003

Class of Fall 2005

Class of Spring 2006

Class of Spring 2008

Class of Fall 2009

Class of Spring 2010

Migrating Forms: The Gitana Xula

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Romani is a mashup culture. With origins in either northern India or Egypt, the Romani people live in nearly all parts of Europe, North Africa, and some of the Arab world. Fittingly, they go by many names: in the Iberian peninsula, the Romani are known as the gitano, or simply Gypsies. Everywhere Gypsies have gone, they have hybridized with local culture producing synthesized genres of fashion, music, and dance. Emerging from the culture-blur is a new figure of distinct character and style: the xula gitana bride of Spain.

Traditionally the gitano of Andalusia adhere to demure, gender-determined fashions. One exception is the extravagant boda gitana—the gypsy wedding. Romani culture worldwide is fervently family-centric, which prioritizes marriage and subsequently children. As a result, virgin gitana brides must pass a ritualistic prueba del pañuelo (handkerchief test) virginity verification, seen here:

They and their families dress in hyperbolic wedding fashion to broadcast and amplify the significance of the event. Unlike traditional American weddings—which are dominated by the highly-styled, pop-cultural spawn of the Queen Victoria’s iconic 19th century white dress—boda gitana visual culture draws from a wildly varied, rich, migrational heritage.

Boda couture ranges from DIY, bedazzled, lycra one-pieces to excruciatingly-crafted, rhinestone-encrusted showpieces, all of which consistently maintain a shiny-equals-expensive maxim. Gitana jewelry has always been like a bank account. Heavy gold pieces mixed with rhinestone-studded tortoise shell brooches and Christmas tinsel are both standardized uniform and capital for future rainy days.

Sparkly Hindi-chandelier-like costumes are still something of a new trend, and the expanding gitano middle class in Andalusia and Catalonia are reinventing traditional wedding ceremonies into decadent Bollywood-worthy productions. The new generation of actively modernizing gitana are known as marica and xula-gitana. Like chalga-chola showgirls at Carnival, these Iberian divas compete with ganguro girls for most-constructed-face. Cindy Sherman could have a second career in Andalusia. Orlan’s iridescent satyr-nub implants look subtle. Christina Aguilera circa Moulin Rouge seems copy-paste. Did Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra birth a litter of Ottoman-marica doppelgängers? The references are almost too rich to fully unpack.

Parallel to the visual mashup of boda fashion, the music and dance of the gitana become a foggy Iberian blend including but not limited to salsa, flamenco, and kuchek bellydance beats. Much like the various genres of pop-folk and turbo-folk in the Balkans, the better-known flamenco is a distinctly Romani product and has been described as a “cry of pain” from hundreds of years gypsy oppression. Rumba gitana, flamenco gitano, and a hybrid salsa-kuchek bellydance are common during the multi-day pre-boda party and the wedding itself. Xula gitanas take turns dancing center-circle, their body glitter and golden faces shimmering as they gyrate.

The xula gitana bride visually lives side-by-side with the modern pop-princess and capitalist-starlet. Spectacle-bride Kim Kardashian’s fire-bombing of the media landscape with images of her lavish ceremony; Kate Moss’s excruciatingly long, multi-dress Vogue story shot by Mario Testino: these are clearly hyper-xula-boda affairs. In both instances the brides are broadcasting a fantastic image of wealth, prosperity, and vitality. Gitana bridal style is an articulation of a complex heritage colliding with these same intense image flows. Their images are glued, painted, sewn—practically welded—together and projected out to their community, and now on the internet, where these images begin to circulate globally, intersecting with new contexts and audiences. It seems a fitting development that a culture based upon migration, adaptation, and remix in the physical world is now aggressively participating in a virtual exchange of image and ideas.

orgullosas de ser gitanas

mi fotogallería

Contemporary Eco Styles

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Credits

Project by Dora Budor + Maja Cule with Rachel De Joode
Photography Rachel De Joode
Digital Post/Visuals/Styling Dora Budor + Maja Cule
Hair and Make-up Michelle Ceja
Models Kern O. Samuel, Irina Cocimarov, Morgan Rehbock, Johannes Thumfart, Elena Meyer-Ginsberg
Studio thanks Olivia Locher

Global Denim Community II:Cult from the Same Cloth

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What began as a simple family favorite has become a full-on global movement.

Denim now inspires acts of devotion like trust-building retreats, beachfront baptisms, cross-cult co-opting espionage. What happens when the movement reaches critical mass remains to be seen, but this fanatical following makes one thing clear: denim is still the fundamental fabric of our lives.


Wake Me When It’s Over.

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The fair opened at two. Now it was three, time for a fashionably late arrival. A car service rolled us up to the vaporetto launch for twenty bucks. Ferries waited near an active helicopter pad. The ships were forty feet long, three decks and open-air seating on the roof, pristine white with blue lettering spelling out aquatically themed names like “Seafoam,” “Seabreeze,” etc. Frieze was pulling out all the stops; as nominal VIPs we could’ve taken chauffeured BMWs to Randall’s Island, complete with audio “artist projects”; or if we preferred, apparently, yachts. It was a shock and awe campaign aimed at the Midwestern firm that had bought the Armory Show several years ago and driven it into the dirt with their trade-show mentality. Give them the Regent’s Park treatment and they would throw down their guns and run screaming all the way back to Illinois.

We had to wait ten minutes and spent the time wondering if any of the helicopters were heading to Roosevelt Island and if so who was in them. Dasha Zhukova? Francois Pinault? The best plan I have for killing myself involves taking a helicopter tour of an impossibly beautiful place, Kaui’i say, and ODing as we graze the canopies of rainforests and limn waterfalls. The choice of music would be important. It wouldn’t be very fair to the pilot, but killing oneself is notoriously unfair to the people you leave behind.

The attendant who’d been blocking our way, clipboard to breast, suddenly let us all pass—but she pointed off to the left, mysteriously away from the yachts. We went around the corner and there was our boat, a dumpy little water taxi bobbing out of sight at the end of the dock. It was painted a kitschy yellow, like a real cab. Truth be told those of us going to the two o’clock opening were only second class at best; the real VIPs had entered at eleven and would have mostly gone by the time we arrived. Our boat did have a bar though, similar to the one on the Staten Island Ferry, and there were nice, colorfully upholstered seats, like on an overnight bus in Europe. An Irish coffee for six bucks washing down half a blue Ambien controlled-release 12.5 mg tablet: we were off.

By the time we had finished getting drinks all the chairs were taken except the jump seats, pull-downs that faced everyone else. I found myself across from my friend J., a hot and possibly brilliant art historian. We talked nonstop for the whole 20 minutes of the trip. She’s manic, practically speaking if not clinically, and I have wanted to sleep with her since we were seated side by side at a dinner party several years ago. In a strange and coincidental turn of events I soon found myself talking to her about R. Kelly. It had to do with Liam Gillick, unfortunately. He is one of those people who when you bitch about them you know you are letting them win—rather like art fairs, actually; rather like capitalism. There was a piece by him in the new Afterall on Trapped in the Closet, which is of course Kelly’s much-wondered-at song/video cycle from the years 2005–07 (a man does have to stay up on the culture). It was a typically ruining-it-for-all-of-us exercise, the way that his writing on Swedish auto-worker factory seizures ruined Marxism, the way that the first show I ever saw by him, related to Walden Two, made me, a psychology major and armchair shrink, think, God, I never want to read that book.

(Gillick famously found it necessary to dispute in print not just certain facts about but also the interpretation of his work propounded in an essay by Claire Bishop in October a few years ago, every exquisite phrase of his correction worthy of lathing into powder-coated aluminum. No, seriously, he writes well; the R. Kelly piece was kind of good. We will see if he reads Dis I guess. I only half fact-checked the above, to give him something to prime the pump.)

At first J. had thought I’d said Mike Kelley, given recent events. R. Kelly? No idea. I gallantly offered to make her a mix. Then on the pretext of inquiring about her health—she’d had surgery two weeks ago—I insisted at taking a look at a fresh scar of hers. I may even have extended a finger toward it. There is a real exhilaration when drugs or a well-scripted social experience kicks in, like a barometric dip.

I can be forgetful in the best of circumstances. We all can. If there weren’t an oven timer, would my frozen pizza burn? If I didn’t have an alarm, would I wake up in the morning? If there weren’t a timer on the treadmill at the gym, would I ever stop running?

*

We debarked. Lingering with J. I fell behind my two companions, a dealer visiting from Mexico and a local artist he shows. I passed some pretty green swards and outdoor sculptures, meeting them on a short crest at the big tent.

Did you see the mayor? the artist said. I had not. What? He was incredulous. Bloomberg had gone in right in front of us; a security man had shouldered him out of the way. And sure enough, when we went inside and passed the ticket window—a flash of a VIP card—there he was, he and his entourage zipping out of view into the maze of booths.

The richest man in New York, the artist said solemnly. I liked the sound of that. Was it true? Close enough. He was short and had a little something wrong with his walk, a bit of a limp or hunch.

We lurched to a stop barely out of the doorway. Something looked amazing. This was the opinion of the artist, named Rod, and after my eyes focused it became mine also. Seven or eight gorgeously soft subtle abstract paintings spread their arms, welcoming you to the inaugural edition of Frieze New York. It took me a long moment to find the placard, which indicated it was the booth of a gallery from L.A. whose name I knew well, and another moment to understand why: the paintings were by a friend of ours. Visual agnosia, the problem is called. As a psychology major I had classes in perception and cognition both.

On my last trip to L.A. I had barely seen our mutual friend; he was busy in the studio. When we did meet up one afternoon he confessed that it felt weird being an emerging artist in his forties; by “weird” he no doubt meant certainly better than it might have been but also precarious. He was telling me he couldn’t afford to fuck it up.

And now here he was at the entrance to an art fair with these Rothko-y things. A week later at auction a Rothko sold for $86.9 million, a new record for a postwar work. Rod took a photo to show him how great the booth looked and when he sent it, I told him to tell him I said hi.

*

As we traversed the floor plan we fell quickly into the social routine intuitive to these sorts of events. The members of your group remain in loose proximity and loose communication as the art rolls by and people you haven’t seen for months or years pop up like zombies in a horror movie. You keep up the appearance that you’re all part of each other’s entourage and try not to ditch for as long as possible. Premature desertion is a real faux pas.

We emerged into a clearing; the fair’s “bespoke architecture” furnished an indefinite number of them. For these and other features—airy volumes, easy traffic flow—the enormous tent was universally praised. It had been designed by a Brooklyn-based firm called SO-IL, a name that should have felt self-deprecating but did not, and had ended up being worthy of the Guinness Book of World Records, built by scabs to boot. OK, not scabs technically, but nonunion labor. We were supposed to object. The New York City & Vicinity District Council of Carpenters would be protesting all weekend, along with an Occupy Wall Street group. These tidbits of consciousness raising circulated, as if the knowing would absolve us for not giving a shit, for crossing a picket, for not picketing ourselves. An inflatable union rat had been earmarked for the entrance, I had read about it but hadn’t seen it. It was possible though I had been oblivious or else gone in the wrong door.

We came to the first of the gourmet restaurants there had been so much buzz about. This was the Fat Radish. I am pretty sure it was the Fat Radish, anyway, because I had always secretly wanted to try the place despite the idiotic dick joke of its name. In the non-Frieze universe it was located around the corner from my girlfriend’s gallery, so I passed it a lot, and it always looked enticing in a way. The food was more or less the same as those lugubrious indie-rock haute locavore places with antlers over the fake fireplace but purged of all that kitsch in favor of classic Hamptons rustique. It was just another kitsch but one honest about its aspirations, which I preferred. Plus I always found upstate depressing and liked the beach.

Rod went with me to the bar. I ordered us a cappuccino and a Fernet. He insisted on ordering his dealer, now absent, a coffee, and graciously paid. We had been ditched but there were professional considerations: it had been a while since Rod had had a show in Mexico City. It is nice to have a drink waiting for you, even if it’s gone cold.

*

Professional considerations. They’re worth going into. The night after the opening the person I was seated next to at dinner told me that he found the element of self-sabotage the most interesting part of my “project,” as he termed it. Which was, now that you mention it, exactly what?

My project was to attend the opening of an event that somehow had come to loom on the art world’s calendar as large as Christmas and turn myself into an obstacle—present but inert, wasting people’s time in pointless and incoherent conversations, disconcerting art dealers by riffling their press materials, image binders, and stacks of catalogues, all with the help of a popular sleep medication—one of the age’s two iconic drugs to my mind. (The other is Adderall, which I had used for the past couple fairs.) It was a tiny gesture against the perpetual-motion gears of stimulus and response that crank our cultural and consumer habitus and, increasingly, the practice of criticism itself. Was it enough to stand aside? No, better to stand around, get in the way. I would wedge myself in a critical conduit and render it inoperable: I would convince someone to commission me to cover Frieze and write something useless, bringing the flow of cultural capital to a halt.

And if a halt was too ambitious, well, I could at least slow things down. Real slow.

*

I had wandered into the show’s Frame section, a collection of solo presentations of youngish artists by new galleries in a “curated” forum. I’m not sure how I got there, or how I knew it was the Frame section, since I was having trouble matching the map to the 4-D world;

probably it was via my ex-roommate J., who shadowed me for a while for laughs, or out of pity. After leaving the restaurant I had taken another half an Ambien and soon it became as if my optic nerves had been shot full of Novocain—the eyes let in light and made pictures but they failed to engage the processing mechanism when it came to language or semiosis of any sort. Nor did the haze allow for any kind of holistic awareness, any of that animal observation of people’s tells; the Ambien blunted my ability to pick up all those little twitches and inflections that make up what we call “mood.” I was locked inside my own little brain-box more than ever, alone with whomever I happened to be talking to or staring dumbly at. Thus I am unable to fulfill one of the functions of a piece of writing like this, which is to say what was “going on,” what it “was like.” People did seem to be enjoying themselves, and the gallerists didn’t seem to be working too hard. But then it behooved them to look as if everything was already sold.

I went to check out an installation by an acquaintance from L.A. She had turned the booth into an oversized gloomy shadowbox—you couldn’t walk into it; in fact you could barely look at it without tumbling into a visual and emotional abyss. It was dense, dark, enveloping, in keeping with a certain strategy for art fairs in which, for publicity, you set up something you could never possibly sell. There were foliage and various other materials I think in a symmetrical ascending layout plus mirrors and video elements and textual LED streams—Indiana Jones meets Nam June Paik meets Jenny Holzer. These details are almost certainly inaccurate, remember.

I said hi to the gallerist, whom I had bad blood with. No doubt she could tell that I was angry at her, because our conversation was brief and awkward and she turned away to talk to a collector or somebody as quickly as possible. Before doing so, however, she handed me an 8 ½ x 11 office laser print titled “Insanity Script” that went with the installation, supposedly. Items included:

—Do you enjoy inflicting physical damage on yourself?
—Are you purposely lying to conceal your mental instability or stability?
—Do you draw pictures of people being violently injured?
—Have you ever tried to fly? Did you die as a result?

The artist walked up. Like Michael Bloomberg she is also short, 5’ 1” on a good day and super cute in my opinion. For the record I am 5’ 6”. People in the art world tend to be smaller, I think.

Before leaving Frame I had to find my girlfriend’s work. Luckily you couldn’t miss the booth: her gallery had gotten a plum placement on a corner. The display had a wide-open look, stark in the way it sconced six or seven assaultive, almost garish artworks. I started examining them from left to right and immediately became lost in the first piece’s intricacy—blinded even. I blinked off the rest like retinal afterimages.

When I opened my eyes the gallery’s director was walking up. We talked for a while. He appeared happy and alert, all spectacles and tie clip. Sometimes he seems too decent to run a gallery. The Mexican dealer I had come to the fair with had complained to me about being called “winsome” in a recent online gossip piece (he pronounced it “wine-some” but neither I nor the artist in his stable corrected him). When he had looked it up he found that it meant “innocent,” technically, which I thought was kind of sweet. He felt to the contrary, however. Of course his complaining was just another kind of bragging: he was grousing so everyone would know the writer was flirting with him in print. But at the same time he had a point. Being an art dealer is like being a gangster: you want people to think you’re an asshole.

As for the girlfriend, she was either floating around near the booth or we called or texted; in either case we met up. She had asked me to leave her out of my Frieze piece, which I totally understood. Professional considerations. I am told that I ran into her best friend D. at some point also, and if so it’s likely to have happened here, with a kiss on the cheek.

All that kissing. The week after Frieze there were a lot of people sick.

*

Rod appeared, the last good man. He took me to the bathroom. There is a lot of talk of American exceptionalism these days but this bathroom was truly exceptional, a modular rental unit that you might masturbate sadly in at the lavish wedding of your ex-girlfriend on her family’s lakeside property on a perfect late spring evening. Unfortunately I can provide no details of its finish or accoutrements. I took another half an Ambien; 18.75 mg, a lot but nothing heroic, even when combined with three or four drinks.

When we emerged we ran into my friend A. He’s someone I love seeing art with, but it was too late for that: closing time had broached the horizon like a black sun. Time for one more drink though, to fortify us for the long walk back to the launch. We strode up to the VIP lounge, which had a Deutsche Bank logo over the door, and were summarily turned away, lacking the right passes: we were, of course, in a world with multiply credentialed echelons of VIP. The lounge for our kind was next door, unmarked. A lack of a logo had never before struck me as déclassé.

Inside it was loud and shit was everywhere, plastic water bottles, dirty napkins, rolled-up discarded maps and other fair paraphernalia, empty cups with gnawed brown stirrers bent over the rims. At the bar drinks were not complementary; Carlos Slim was no doubt sipping freebies in the Deutsche Bank ultralounge but here you had to pay. A. was ready to forget it but out of spite—masochism—I insisted on waiting in a scrum to buy us a couple of sixteen-dollar flutes of champagne with my Capital One card. Two underpaid and undertipped people in rental bowties ran unhappy dashes behind the bar trying to keep up with the customers. It was taking a while. There was a cocktail menu but my eyes wouldn’t focus at all at short range. The bartenders were playing goalie in a game we could all only lose. As the last of my tranquility simmered off, I turned to A. and said, Fuck it, let’s go.

Except that it wasn’t A., it was my friend N. Like him she is wise, kind, and a curator, but they are pretty different in most other respects. I was not sure when they switched or even if it was her I had been with all along. Rod had disappeared at some point in here too, I realized. Possibly midsentence I walked off and was immediately alone.

Then after a gap of seconds or half an hour I had landed with my friend M., an artist, who wrapped her arm around my leg. She was seated and had arrested me as I’d walked past her—I was noticing a lot of people and ignoring them, apparently. We had a moderately sexualized relationship ever since we made out a few years ago at a Christmas party. She was wearing something backless, leather it seemed and maybe made out of an old couch: like her work the garment displayed an impressive handling of materials. As her arm seemed to have boaed itself around my thigh so my hand felt free to drift down her back across a limitless expanse of skin. She was cool, refreshing. Ambien is a great drug for sex if you can remember to use protection.

*

People were leaving. There was a scurrying-for-the-lifeboats feeling. My wits were coming back. I found myself alone surrounded by people on their cel phones, all going places and making plans.

I pulled out my phone and called my friend David, a lawyer. Though the financial realities of having two young children have caused him to take on a variety of freelance assignments, he spends the bulk of his time working to ensure that prisoners are accorded all their legal rights, guilt or innocence be damned. I frequently encourage him to bring his razorlike logic to bear on the absurdities of the art world and of my life.

So many people have looked at me in quiet horror when I’ve told them about going to Frieze on Ambien that despite having explained once already, above, I will in closing reproduce the apologia I left on David’s voice mail when he failed to pick up.

True, the market vests less power in critics than it once did. And yet it desires legitimation seemingly separate from itself, so that the abstraction of money can claim access to “the real.” Expert opinion is required, since in the realm of the aesthetic what is real or true is a tenuous thing.

But opinions are like assholes, as the adage goes—everybody’s got one. And it’s not your grandfather’s asshole we’re talking about here. Today’s bung is perpetually massaged, in constant dialogue with the smooth rod of consumer capitalism reaming it in and out, over and over, to infinity. The annular ring modulates per cybernetic loop: a tenderly calibrated response reciprocates the slightest stimulus. We are continuously palpated, examined, and conditioned by that examination to crave more of it in a constant, low-level-erotic give and take. No proposition passes without meaningless contestation, no web page is complete without a moot Comments field. And all of it rouses a meaningless tingle in the groin.

The interpellation of critics by something like Frieze is akin to our general interpellation into a set of false choices, designer skins on the same piece of tasteless fruit. To choose not to respond—that might be a choice. But if you don’t speak, how will anyone know why you’re keeping quiet?

Frieze New York. Would you care to take a brief survey about your experience? No, I would not.


Fit for Society

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Patricia wears Kenzo top, Pologeorgis fur, Skins biking bodysuit, and Adidas sneakers.


Pat wears Underarmour leggings, Adidas sports bra, Christopher Kane jacket, and Adidas SLVR shoes.


Sam wears Adidas Originals track suit, Mugler coat, Adidas shell toes, and Trivecta stroller.


Nancy wears Brooks Brothers shirt, J.W. Anderson sweater, Pologeorgis fur, Stella for Adidas leggings, Black Diamond walking stick, and Laser Shades.


Sam wears Rachel Zoe jacket, Adidas sports bra, 2XU shorts, Nathans leg bands, Adidas hat and shoes, and Oscar de la Renta for Linda Farrow glasses.


Carol wears Adidas shirt, Norma Kamali coat and shawl, Nike leggings, Joyce Leslie keychain necklace, and Louis Vuitton bag.


Nancy wears Nike shirt, Rachel Zoe pants, and Adidas gloves.


Pat wears Underarmour shirt, J.W. Anderson skirt, and Fila 5-toe shoes.


Patricia wears Adidas shirt and leggings, Temperley trench, Adidas watch, and Alexander Wang bag.


Carol wears Band of Outsiders cardigan and jacket, Adidas shorts, Osprey backpack, Saskia Diez necklace, CC Skye bracelet, and Oscar de la Renta for Linda Farrow sunglasses.


Nancy wears Proenza Schouler jacket, Underarmour shirt, and Mizuno leggings.


Credits


Opening Ceremony Annual 2012

By DIS

Hair Bryce Scarlett
Makeup Michael Anthony
Casting Preston Chaunsumlit
Featuring Pat Cleveland @ Trump, Carol Alt @ Trump, Sam Ypma @ Trump, Patricia Neville @ Wilhelmina, and Nancy Ozelli.

As seen in the 2012 Opening Ceremony Annual. Get your copy today!

♆ Spartan Race ♆

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DIS Magazine elected a team of the finest artist-slash-athletes known to man to compete in Spartan Race, a grueling international game of endurance and danger. Meet the team and see them overcome the brutal hurdles of humanity.


Credits

Editor Theo Anthony
Cinematography Thunderhorse Video
Graphic Design Maria Chimishkyan

DISability: Foot Work

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The latest in a new breed of non-discriminating multimedia artists. She paints, draws, sculpts, makes videos, conceptual art, and net art all with her feet. She's not disabled; she's DISabled.


Credits

Photos Marco Roso
Styling Lauren Boyle
Featuring Bunny Rogers

Fair Trade

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Fair Trade uses the galleries and architecture of the Frieze London Art Fair as both backdrop and subject. The images, commissioned for Frieze Projects 2012, are a continuation of DIS's exploration into new ways of documenting art.


Fair Trade: DIS x Frieze Foundation

Vortex (Dalí), Vortex (Fluorescent), and Metal Box by Jim Lambie. Untitled (Alice Cooper) by John Bock (Anton Kern Gallery, A4).

Fair Trade: DIS x Frieze Foundation

Young man wet with rain by Jeff Wall. Untitled by Rachel Whiteread (Galleria Lorcan O’Neill, G13).

Fair Trade: DIS x Frieze Foundation

Young man wet with rain by Jeff Wall (Galleria Lorcan O’Neill, G13).

Fair Trade: DIS x Frieze Foundation

Time Interrupted, I Turn to Clock (Yellow), and Sausage Chasing Rock by Geoffrey Farmer (Casey Kaplan, B4).

Fair Trade: DIS x Frieze Foundation

Miroir Claude by Kris Martin. Untitled by Fabrice Samyn (Sies + Höke, F21).

Fair Trade: DIS x Frieze Foundation

Jamie’s Band, I-Be Area, Copy Rights, Re’Search Wait’S, and A Sally Was by Ryan Trecartin (Andrea Rosen Gallery, A6).

Fair Trade: DIS x Frieze Foundation

Axe Africa by Josh Kline (47 Canal, R6).

Fair Trade: DIS x Frieze Foundation

John Chamberlain. Rudolf Stingel. Walrus, Carsten Höller. (Gagosian Gallery, D7).

Fair Trade: DIS x Frieze Foundation

Untitled by Franz West. FM 14 by Albert Oehlen (Gagosian Gallery, D7).

Fair Trade: DIS x Frieze Foundation

Red, Yellow and Blue Picture by Eric Wesley (Bortolami Gallery, F11). JW Anderson suit, Delfina Delettrez necklace and bag, Jean Paul Gaultier dress, Kenzo shoes.

Fair Trade: DIS x Frieze Foundation

Sunrise/Sunset by Ricci Albenda. Carpet III by Marc Camille Chaimowicz (Andrew Kreps Gallery, C5).

Fair Trade: DIS x Frieze Foundation

Form of Togetherness by Ross Knight (Team Gallery, E15).

#ArtSelfie

Directions

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Spencer Ashby and Analisa Teachworth take to the street, literally, to conduct an inquisitive field study of car enthusiasts at the annual Woodward Dream Cruise -- an automobile show and parade which takes place on the historic Woodward Avenue. The famed stretch of asphalt predates highways, and served as the most effective/visible/relevant street to the urban planning of Detroit, Michigan. With their gaze for exoticism, Spencer and Analisa ask these automobile aficionados about the aesthetic and mechanical importance of their wistful whips.


Credits

Directed by Analisa Teachworth and Spencer Ashby
Shot and Edited by Analisa Teachworth and Spencer Ashby
Images by Analisa Teachworth and Spencer Ashby
Music by Slufter (Antonio Manzari)

Real Housewives of Art Basel Miami

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Guardians of an antiquated brand of authenticity are quick to discredit things today that may appear fake or mercenary—as if these qualities have no connection to understanding truth and generosity! Reality TV and art fairs are prime targets for these vigilante haters. The wondrous city of Miami plays host to both, and is better understood in light of them. Art Basel Miami Beach needs no introduction as the dictionary definition of a modern day bacchanal; who better than The Real Housewives of Miami to share their local perspectives on what the overgrown week has become, and how broadly its unwieldy umbrella extends. During the most recent Art Basel I sat with three ladies from the show—Marysol Patton, a Miami native and owner of The Patton Group public relations company; Adriana De Moura, originally from Sao Paulo, whose gallery Markowicz Fine Art is in the Design District; and Alexia Echevarria, editor-in-chief of Venue magazine, also born and raised in Miami—to talk about the event that has put their city on the map for you and all your friends and all the worst people you’ve ever met. Each conversation kicked off with a word association game using some of the week’s most contiguous buzzwords…

Marysol Patton
Photographed at Fendi Casa in the Design District. Marysol wears jewelry by Orianne Collins

Kevin: Art
Marysol: Color
Kevin: Artist
Marysol: Bohemian
Kevin: Art fair
Marysol: Oh god…. Masses.
Kevin: Art Basel
Marysol: Glitzy
Kevin: Design
Marysol: Fascinating
Kevin: Designer
Marysol: Fun
Kevin: Fashion
Marysol: Passion
Kevin: Style
Marysol: Born with it
Kevin: Party
Marysol: Cocktails
Kevin: Luxury
Marysol: Patton Group
Kevin: Brand
Marysol: Image
Kevin: Wealth
Marysol: Interesting
Kevin: Fake
Marysol: Dreadful
Kevin: Real
Marysol: Fabulous
Kevin: Miami
Marysol: Over the top

Kevin: Were you born in Miami?

Marysol: Mhmm.

Kevin: Have you ever lived anywhere else?

Marysol: I lived one year in Boston, my first year of college. And I lived seven months in Istanbul with my first husband, who was Turkish.

Kevin: So have you been involved with Art Basel all along?

Marysol: Since I’ve had my business—so around ten years.

Kevin: What do you think of what it’s become?

Marysol: It’s always been about art, which is its basis, but now it’s taken over the social calendar. It’s just this huge social experience and celebrities, every year there’s more and more. At least in our office, we get a lot of fashion brands that come down; they do private dinners with the designers. It’s interesting how in the beginning we worked with big art galleries, and then it started transforming into a few art galleries and fashion brands bringing the art element in.

Kevin: Does the week reflect Miami?

Marysol: It does. I think it’s the most cultural time of year here. Miami is becoming a more cultural city. It’s still in its infancy and growing. Different performing art centers, and the ballet is going through its metamorphosis, it’s just becoming… we’re in that infancy stage, and Art Basel kind of makes people view Miami in that way, that aren’t from here, and would not view us that way.

Kevin: Do you collect art yourself?

Marysol: I do; not modern. I like Old Masters, old English portraits. I think I only have portraits, actually. We have Warhols in our office. They belong to the landlord. They’re great though. They go with the office. My home is kind of beachy slash English, so I love those dark kinds of portraits that you would see in a library in Boston or something. You know what I’m talking about? Black and brown.

Kevin: Like a Sargent or something.

Marysol: Yeah. I only have women. I’ve never been able to find a portrait of a man that I like. Or one that I could afford that I liked [laughs]. I have a few hunting scenes.

Kevin: Do you live on the beach?

Marysol: I live on Brickell and the office is also on Brickell. Not too much driving.

Kevin: What do you like about portraits so much?

Marysol: I don’t know, I just feel like they have so much character and history to them. When you’re looking into the eyes of someone. I have a portrait of my great, great, great grandmother in my living room, and it was painted in 1640; it’s spectacular. It is. And I look at her and I see myself. I see characteristics of myself, and I look at all the portraits and I wonder, Who is that person? What is their life about? What did they think? What were there ideals? How many days did they sit for that portrait? I don’t know. There’s so much depth to a photo of a human being.

Kevin: Do you find modern art off-putting, or do you simply prefer the classics?

Marysol: I like to look at modern art, and I love it when I go in someone else’s home and see it, but it doesn’t give me the warmth that portraits do—that feels homey to me. Maybe it’s just that part of me that always wants to be at a party. It looks like my house is full of people!

Kevin: How about in terms of designers or brands: do you have favorites?

Marysol: It’s so weird, I love anything that’s beautiful. I’m not a slave to labels or a certain brand or anything. I have noticed lately I’ve been wearing a lot of Emilio Pucci; the whole time we filmed, and lately every time I go to a party and pick something, it ends up being Pucci. But Peter Dundas, the new designer, is doing a lot of things in solids. It’s not so much about the prints any more. But I do love the prints. And I like Cavalli a lot. I love their clothes too.

Kevin: Could you describe your personal brand?

Marysol: My personality I would describe as… I guess you could describe me as shy but friendly once I get to know you. If you see me on the street, I’m not one to stop or walk up to people at parties, I’m very to myself. Sometimes people misconstrue that as me being a snob or particular, but I’m not at all. I’m just to myself and shy. Once I’m in a party setting, I talk to everybody, if they come talk to me. I just don’t talk to strangers, I’m really shy. Actually, I had a man today, on the elevator of my office building, say to me, “Can I ask you something?” and I said “Sure!” and I thought he was going to ask me about the show, like everybody else does. And he goes, “Are you ever going to say hello to me in the elevator?” and I apologized, I’m just always on my blackberry, I’m very shy, and an elevator is such a confining, strange place for people to say hello. It’s not the first time that’s happened to me. I like to joke around a lot. I have a humongous sense of humor–or people tell me that. I don’t think I’m very funny, but other people do. And then, my style of dressing… is that what you mean by personal brand?

Kevin: Sure, everything. That comes into play, it’s a big part of how you express yourself.

Marysol: I love to dress–my interpretation of chic. It’s hard to say. I like things that are really beautiful and striking, but not vulgar, and I don’t like to be too revealing. I never wear low cut things. If I go out with shorts on, then I’ll wear like a little medium heel, make sure I have a long sleeve, and I’m buttoned. If I’m covering this I’ll show more of this, and vice versa. I guess I’m kind of classic. Classic dress but not so classic. Fashionably classic.


Adriana de Moura
Photographed at Markowicz Fine Art in the Design District

Kevin: Art
Adriana: My life
Kevin: Artists
Adriana: Difficult
Kevin: Art fair
Adriana: Ecstasy
Kevin: Art Basel
Adriana: Insanity
Kevin: Design
Adriana: Essential
Kevin: Designer
Adriana: Challenging
Kevin: Fashion
Adriana: My passion
Kevin: Style
Adriana: Who doesn’t have it, doesn’t need to be around art
Kevin: Party
Adriana: Occasionally
Kevin: Luxury
Adriana: Vital
Kevin: Brand
Adriana: Essential, but I already said essential… crucial
Kevin: Fake
Adriana: No
Kevin: Real
Adriana: Yes
Kevin: Miami
Adriana: Center of the world

Kevin: How did you originally come to Miami?

Adriana: I came here for law school at the University of Miami, and I wanted to join my knowledge and passion of art with law. I wanted to specialize in international art law. So I did about a year of law school before I figured out it was so dry and the minutiae of the law was actually going to kill my passion for art, which is all about creativity and spontaneity, things that are opposite to law. So, I just gave that up and instead I opened my gallery on Fisher Island.

Kevin: Do you feel things have gotten out of hand with Art Basel?

Adriana: It’s just overwhelming. I get anxiety before the week even starts. I was doing a photoshoot for something and I’m just, my mind, I can’t even concentrate because of the rush, of everything that needs to be done. It’s just overwhelming, really. There’s so much. You have content in one week that you could spread over three years. In terms of who is here, parties, exhibitions, fairs, and I think they just want to drive everyone crazy, literally.

Kevin: Miami is part of so many out-of-towners’s annual routines now, but are they really picking on the spirit of the city?

Adriana: Something people don’t realize is that the art scene in Miami is thriving, but it’s a year-round happening. People just think Miami happens in terms of art once a year when Art Basel hits, but that’s not true. We continuously work, and we continuously develop this art scene throughout the year, on a much lower key, but it’s pretty steady. I think people need to realize: don’t come just for Art Basel, come for your spring break, or Thanksgiving, or your Easter break, because there are very worthy artists and galleries around town.

Kevin: Who are some of your favorite international artists?

Adriana: My all time favorite is Jean-Michel Basquiat, whom I have in my collection. I have two Basquiats in my personal collection, in my house. Besides that, I have great admiration for a Brazilian artist named Vik Muniz, who has been skyrocketing into the international art scene, and I like him because, not only is he very original in what he does––he does these huge spaces, for example, he got trash, from a trash dumpster, and created images, I’m talking about miles of creating images, and going over in a helicopter and photographing, and so you could only see the image from the airspace–recycling to that extent, I find it unbelievable. So conscious with our times, our need to recycle, and creating art in a great magnitude, I just admire that tremendously.

Kevin: Is that image really precise, or is it figurative?

Adriana: Yeah, it is figurative, obviously not figuratively detail-wise, because it is so big, and the scale is immense, but you see a face within these mounds of trash, but he designs that face and you see the image coming out.

Kevin: Are there particular designers or brands that you really support?

Adriana: Fashion-wise?

Kevin: Sure.

Adriana: I’m a big fan of Craig Robins, he is the guy that developed Design Miami, but also the Design District, where we are at right now, and I think he’s doing a phenomenal job bringing names like Prada, Louis Vuitton, Marni, Martin Margiela, Christian Louboutin, everyone you can imagine is moving to the design district. Personally I love Prada, I love Miu Miu, Christian Louboutin like every other girl. I like a little bit of the girly, vintage-y, quirky look.

Kevin: How about a favorite hotel here?

Adriana: Well, my fiancé is a hotel designer. He’s actually designing two new hotels, they’re going to be amazing. Depending on what you’re going for. If you’re going for medium range price, great value, on the water, nice design, I would say, the hotel that my fiancé designed, which is called the Grand Beach Hotel, which is on Collins and 58th, right on the water. If you’re talking about boutique, the SLS, right now I love, too.

Kevin: It feels like Vegas, they’re all kind of the same in their own way.

Adriana: Yeah, exactly, it’s the strip, we call it Millionaire’s Row, they are within blocks of each other. I usually prefer smaller places if I’m traveling, I don’t usually go where everybody is, but Miami, it’s kind of like that: you have to go either Ocean Drive or Millionaire’s Row. Everybody wants the water anyway.

Kevin: How would you describe your personal brand?

Adriana: I conceive fashion as an art form—the right right look makes me feel confident yet fun and playful. Life is short, seize each moment and don’t take yourself too seriously–”carpe diem” is motto.


Alexia Echevarria
Photographed at a Charlotte Olympia signing in the shoe department of Neiman Marcus in Bal Harbour

Kevin: Art
Alexia: Creativity
Kevin: Artist
Alexia: I don’t want to be redundant and say creative, I’ll say that the artists are unique
Kevin: Art fair
Alexia: International
Kevin: Art Basel
Alexia: Contemporary art
Kevin: Design
Alexia: Worldly
Kevin: Designer
Alexia: Artist
Kevin: Fashion
Alexia: I get a big smile on my face when you say fashion! Fashion would be… makes me smile. Makes me happy.
Kevin: Style
Alexia: Your own
Kevin: Party
Alexia: Miami
Kevin: Luxury
Alexia: Life
Kevin: Brand
Alexia: I love so many brands… to me it’s not about the brand or the label, it’s about the beauty of it, or how you like it… for brand I would say, beauty.
Kevin: Wealth
Alexia: Not important. Individuality.
Kevin: Fake?
Alexia: I was going to say something… but I’m not. The first thing that came to my mind: people.
Kevin: Real
Alexia: Me
Kevin: Miami
Alexia: I don’t want to say international again, so I’ll say hot.

Kevin: So, were you born in Miami?

Alexia: Yes.

Kevin: Have you ever lived anywhere else?

Alexia: I’ve lived in Madrid, Spain. I moved to Madrid when I was seventeen with my mom, and my brothers and sisters, and I did my last year of high school there, and then I went on to the American University, where I did my undergraduate.

Kevin: Have you always been involved with media?

Alexia: You know what, I haven’t. It was my husband, my second husband, whom I’ve been with for 13 years, is the owner of a communications company that focuses on marketing and communications, so he’s at that advertising agency, and then for the last six years, I’ve been the editor for Venue, and that’s also owned by my husband.

Kevin: How long have you been taking part in Art Basel?

Alexia: My husband is a huge art lover. And so am I, but to me, art is about what I love, or what I like. I will buy a painting not because of the financial value it will have or what it will represent for me as far as investment. I will buy it because I think it is beautiful. I am all about the eye and what it looks like. I understand its more complicated than that, it’s more complex and there’s a lot of history behind it and all that, but my husband has always been a huge art lover, and we collect some art, so when I met him thirteen years ago, I started developing more of a love for it. Besides when I lived in Spain, one of my classes was History of Art, and in Europe, different from here, we would take the class in the museum. There a love of art started awakening in me, but besides that the history is very important. To me, once you know the history, you fall in love more with a portrait, because they all have a meaning behind it.

Kevin: What do you think of what the art week has become?

Alexia: Like everything, I think that a lot of times it loses focus, it really should be about the art, and it’s just besides the fact that it’s a week for the arts, its also a week that people like to come for social networking, just because its the place to be and the weather’s great, and there’s all these other activities that are going on. I think Art Basel, it’s great for the city, it’s great for Miami, and I’m so glad we can have that part of culture in our city, because we have a very important city. We have so many different cultures that are here. You know there is a huge latin american art movement, there’s so many movements, and I think Miami is the best city for that. We have so many different nationalities.

Kevin: Who are some of your favorite artists?

Alexia: I like the Cuban artists, because I have become familiar with them, because my husband collects them. So I think it becomes dear to you, of course you want to know who is hanging on your wall, so you do research on them, and you get to meet them. I got to meet one Cuban artist, about three years ago, he’s a contemporary artist, Roberto Favello, He has just beautiful art, and I’ve become a huge fan of his, since I know him. Just like a designer to me, once you know the person, it becomes so much more special, because you get to know what inspired him. Of course you read about it, but this is the artist himself telling you what inspired him to draw this. And it’s always a great story, and this particular artist always puts his wife in the painting, so he always has something funny to say about that. But I love Wilfredo Lam, Mario Carreño, Mariano Rodríguez, those are all cuban artists. I guess that I’m more fond of them because I have them in my house. And I think that the Cuban population, because of the fact that it’s a generation that will always be marked, and will always be very nostalgic, because they had to flee their country. So, you know, you always want a little piece of your country, and I think that the Cubans that do have the means of collecting some kind of art, a lot of them have tended to go that way, to collect Cuban art, because it is something that’s dear to them, and it’s like the last thing of Cuba they can hold onto: their artists.

Kevin: What about favorite designers?

Alexia: There are so many great ones! There really are. We’re living at a time now that there are so many talented people. The creativity, fashion now, it has so much importance in the world. I think fashion, just everything revolves around fashion and food for me. So I have so many, for example, Charlotte Olympia, that I just met today, Christian Louboutin, Gucci, Michael Kors, Roberto Cavalli, Emilio Pucci. So many up and coming ones, Roland Mouret, Victoria Beckham, Tory Burch, Alexander Wang. There’s so many of them, I love them all.

Kevin: How would you describe your personal brand?

Alexia: Well you know, I love sexy, and glamorous. I like classic also, I surprise people because I’ll be classic but throw in something edgy. I’m trendy, I think I’m very feminine and sexy. That’s about it. I don’t like to talk about myself. I’m like open to anything as long as it looks cool. I won’t really follow a trend just because it’s in style. Of course I think the most important part is that you can own it, whatever it is, that you can feel good about yourself in it, and that you can wear it. I’m not going to wear it just because it’s in style. I think you have to be confident. Whether it’s tacky or good or not, if you feel it, and you think it looks great on you, you will send that message, and then you can wear it.


Credits

Interviews and Production by Kevin McGarry
Photography by Naomi Fisher

Flow States » Boru O’Brien O’Connell » DISimages

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Here are mental states of operation in which the subject is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, revelatory glow, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.











See more on DISimages.com!


Images Boru O’Brien O’Connell
Styling Avena Gallagher
Hair Luke Baker
Makeup Deanna Melluso

1. Topman, Telfar Clemens, American Apparel, New Balance. 2. Jean Paul Gaultier, Meadham Kirchoff. 3. Assembly, JW Anderson. 4. Meadham Kirchoff. 5. Trnswrld, Nikolai Rose. 6 & 7. Assembly. 8. VPL. 9. Meadham Kirchoff, Alternative Apparel. 10. JW Anderson, Naked. 11. Yohji Yamamoto, Levi’s, John Fleuvog.

Tissue Stock

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These never-before-seen tissue studies are a survey of local tissue design as well as Gulf tissue stock imagery.

In the Gulf, the formula: Hygiene = Wealth is deeply embedded aka the more "hygienic," the wealthier a person. This post-oil obsession with hygienic products—wet wipes, disinfectants, tissue, hand sanitizers, etc, relates to a sanitized, generic aesthetic preferred in the Gulf. This behavior is an attempt to control the organic chaos of the original, pre-oil and dust-ridden environment. Behavior that has become more pronounced with the increased variety of local hygienic products, in line with consumerist tendencies.


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Credits

Tissue Stock Khalid al Gharaballi and Fatima Al Qadiri

The kleenex boxes were originally shot by Khalid and Fatima for the cover of the photonovella, Mahma Kan Athaman (2010), designed by Babak Radboy, written by Sophia Al Maria and published by Bidoun magazine. The box that made it on the front cover was 'Hi Tissue', which two years later inspired their work Mendeel Um A7mad (NxIxSxM) (2012) funded by the Arab Fund for Art and Culture (AFAC), an installation that revolved around the national cult of tissue and the Kuwaiti Chai Dhaha ritual.

Images available for purchase on disimages.com

New Fragrance Options

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1.-Critical-1
2.Romance2
3.-Young-Girl
4.-PostOrganic
5.-ProEverything
6.-Uncanny
7.-Anti

Credits

New Perfume Options from the series 'Skin That Drinks' by Dora Budor

Photography Joshua Citarella
Digital Post Dora Budor
Styling Tatiana Valentin
Makeup Kirsten Kilponen
Makeup Assistant Nana Asase
Producer Hannah Daly
Assistants Erin Grant, Akira Ishikura
All Clothes Telfar, Patrik Ervell, Eckhaus Latta, Stylist's own Images available for purchase on disimages.com

Mer-Life

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In the wake of America's favorite caffeinated mascot and TLC reality programming, Mer-culture has gone mainstream — immobilizing the daily grind and coming ashore hybridized and waterlogged. Get into the Mer-Life.
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Credits

By DIS
Makeup Michele Ceja
Mer-tail provided by www.themertailor.com
Featuring Louis @ Red, David @ Red, Analisa Teachworth, Maluca Mala, Raul Lopez, Melissa Burns, Bec Fordyce, and Bryan C.
For more Mer-Options go to Disimages.com

An Evolving Turn

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MICHAEL JONES MCKEAN



In different ways, you both seem invested in discussions involving objects and images produced explicitly for our consumption – commodities that are manufactured, branded and massively marketed to us. If we pan out there is, of course, a long history of artworks using consumer-based objects and images, sprawling from the readymade, synthetic cubism, surrealist collage, arte povera, pop, neo geo and now to our extended epoch of appropriation. Yet this trajectory, leading through appropriation, seems to be shifting, naturalizing into another ethos entirely, one not born in resistance to appropriation, but one that has so fully absorbed its teachings that objects and images designed within corporations and factories are now just other objects – substances – living in a dense, sometimes delirious field of other objects. We can view this consumer class of object (from to iPads to Adidas shell toes) as having certain diegetic and extra-diegetic properties just as other unbranded commodities do such as an olive tree, a copper plate, a clay brick, a beta fish, a kiwi fruit. I bring this up to begin because some of the basic ways artists seem to be inviting objects into their work seems to be shifting. These changes seem important to recognize and start to shape a parallel universe where artworks might be asked to perform more speculative tasks and rituals.

TIMUR SI-QIN



I think that’s an excellent way of putting it. A shift is happening in which the hierarchy separating natural and manufactured objects is dissolving. This shift is a conceptual deanthropocentrification since in reality humans and their material outputs are just as much a part of nature as termite mounds and seashells. The idea of a separation between the synthetic and natural is a religious conceptual artifact (God having created the separate categories of animals, man and woman.) I think one thing that is allowing this shift to take place is the slowly building understanding that the consumer-object world is largely governed by uncontrollable, non-agential, natural emergent forces rather than any particular ideologies. Or maybe I should say that ideological forces are emergent, causal and natural forces in and of themselves.

PABLO LARIOS



I think it’s difficult to historicize the shift you allude to, Michael, though it is clear to me that we see traces of changes in the relationship between commodities and objecthood on the one hand, and objecthood and the work of art on the other. This goes beyond the platitude that every work is also a commodity; more pernicious is the reality of situations like the merging of production and consumption, changes in the way knowledge is acquired and monetized, shifts in the distribution of images, or the nature of images altogether (maybe all images, insofar as they’re convertible to 1’s and 0’s, are simultaneously texts, too.) The very phrase ‘nature of commodities’ would have once sounded like an oxymoron, but I’m not sure it is anymore. (At least, no more so than Marx’s likeness of the commodity as a kind of upside-down, or dancing, table. Marx could only approach what was lifeless (un-natural) by animating it, turning it into a kind of animal:

The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.

Another way I notice such a shift, at least in how it relates to art, is in the way ‘appropriation’ seems inapplicable – or at least applicable only incompletely – to works such as yours. The works clearly bring in commodities in a way that once would have been categorized as appropriation. But, as I’ve written before, ‘appropriation’ as such is no longer a stable concept because of shifts in how labor is performed and conceived of. Appropriation as a concept – as a ‘making proper’ what is initially exogenous – reflects a model of working that maintains the ipseity, the self-sameness, of individual agents. I think agency has, quite recently, changed; as agency changes, appropriation begins to appear simplistic because the model of agency it is predicated on is itself outmoded, or at least simplistic.

Just look at our very lexicon: referred to recently as several things: appropriation, recontextualization, détournage, or, as far as the shift in labor practices go, as a shift toward ‘collaborative’ modes, i.e. real-life social networking. I think it’s too soon to say, too early to historicize it; I just feel that the concept has cracks in it. Just look at the eye-rolls the very word ‘appropriation’ tends to produce. As far as a divide in nature/manufactured objects, it’s clear that this is in a state of flux (maybe it always has been).

Michael Jones McKean

Michael Jones McKean

MICHAEL JONES MCKEAN



I agree it’s weird to historicize topics so alive in our here-and-now. In terms of history, my opening comments were more aimed to suggest that these canonical, heritage-y terms are feeling shopworn, a little tired as active placeholders for what seems to be happening on-the-ground level within cultural production. I think we are mostly in agreement here, Pablo. It’s like after the initial hedonistic blowout of appropriation proper, people slowly forgot who the party was for, but decided to stick around anyway – drinking it up. I think some folks are waking up from the binge now, but with a special clarity achieved only through over-exposure. What’s emerging is not a ‘kill your father’ militarized evolution, but something achieved more silently, gradually – overnourishment breeding special adaptations.

Following up, Timur, yes I agree, we’re in some kind of corrective crawl, mending a lived-through myopia extending back to the notion that our earth must be the center of the universe – a kind of ultimate anthropocentric view. But as we embrace more deeply de-anthropocentrification as an ethos, say for instance within the refinements to the various realist camps and speculative movements, one would imagine we might find ways to re-plug into an equally robust, parallel discussion on ethics. I’m curious if the discussion could become more strange and more generative if a space for verbs, perception, feeling, romance could also open up, making space for a fully emergent and complex form of humanism. In some ways I see this as a classic function that artists have been involved with – borrowing some of the more utilitarian straight-talk within the hard-humanities and scientific communities and extending these findings to some other, totally speculative place, one not so singularly beholden or dogmatic.

TIMUR SI-QIN



When thinking about ethics in relation to art I usually have this to say: Art is not directly constrained by ethics; but artists are humans and humans are social-primates who have evolved ethics as an adaptation. In this way, art is indirectly constrained by ethics. I think a form of ethics based on emergence would be coming from sociobiology/evolutionary-psychology. Since the emergent system that is at play would be the human system and it’s emergent and historically evolved social morphologies.

PABLO LARIOS



Timur, you align yourself with biological and ecological models; both of you adhere to the tactility of certain objects, and play off the semiological resonances of imagery familiar to us through our everyday consumer experience, but also through all that is “massively marketed” to us. The artist, like a consumer, is choosing between materials; like a character in a video game, adapting different skins or even discrete/conflicting avatars…

One thing I tried to stress in my piece is the reciprocal relationship that consumers and corporations now have; the person has become the product; this is something reflected in micro-advertising tactics – entire markets are developing. Corporations create markets; they don’t simply fulfill them.

Art-historical models can both predict this and seem to go blank on it as a subject. The entire lexicon, inherited from Marxism and capitalism dually, of ‘commodities’ and ‘consumers’ has already fallen apart. … the prosumer, the unreadymade, the neo-material, these hybrid formulations point to an inadequacy in the terminology we’ve inherited from outmoded economic models.

In the same way that certain art objects can simultaneously embrace ‘the market’ and, in discrete instances, seem to offer up resistance to it. The dualities in you guys’ exhibition, the contradictions at play (death as a form of love, say), seem to embody this.

Timur Si-Qin

Timur Si-Qin

TIMUR SI-QIN



Right, the mistake that Marxist materialism made was to make labor the only material that mattered. When in reality, actual materials and their properties, like copper, wood and oil are the real driving forces of the world. Also Manuel De Landa has argued, via economic historian Fernand Braudel that the term “Capitalism” is also only a reified generality that does not actually map to reality. That is, there is no “capitalist” system; there are many emergent heterogenous economic systems alive in the world. Some are more fair than others. But all are predicated by the biological constraints of the body, that we need food, water and shelter, and because we are social animals these are provided to us through systems of exchange with conspecifics. This is why it is irrational and I would argue also an ascetic religious notion to think that we can or should ever escape “the market.” After all it is ultimately economic forces that drive the form of all things, from a frog’s leg to the shape of a leaf.

MICHAEL JONES MCKEAN



Pablo, when you mention that the lexicon of Marxism and the trusted relationship between commodities and consumers has weakened – perhaps its important to also claim with certainty, and total inevitability, that these sacred concepts are really only momentarily useful to us – with time, they will indeed all fail. I agree with you, to me these kinds of terminologies are feeling more and more outmoded – ill – perhaps in a similar way the quickly evolving discussion surrounding real and virtual now seems, by all measures, quaint, totally nostalgic. To me, thinkers like De Landa don’t necessarily lead us out from the hegemony of these models, but they might be pointing toward possible exits.

Not to overly romanticize art making here, but in relation to this topic, the field feels open and exciting as a site to model some of these ideas in a more skewed, malleable way – one not so fixed to a prescribed utility. With De Landa, one of the reasons I think he’s so often brought up in artist circles is the almost psychedelic nature of his thinking, there are these nutritious parallels: the expansion and compression of scales, peripatetic wandering over ages and regions, the fluidity between disciplines. Moreover, the basic supposition of a mind-independent universe, a precept he reminds us of repeatedly, is at its core empathetic. It evokes a solidarity with things – this is deeply abstract, a kind of ethics in and of itself.

PABLO LARIOS



As far as ethics go, works such as yours seem to draw a particular, peculiar form of power in that they seem to underwrite an ethics. If, as I said earlier, shifts are occurring both in what constitutes ‘nature’ as well as in how agency is conceived of, then both of these changes imply shifts in power relations and, by extension, ethics (insofar as ethics concerns itself with economies of power).

Michael Jones McKean

Michael Jones McKean

MICHAEL JONES MCKEAN



I like this idea of what ‘underwriting an ethic’ might be. Maybe there is a way to parlay this talk of ethics to another topic that drifts in and out of the exhibition – definitely in Timur’s project – violence as a concept. Perhaps the comparison is too abstract, but it makes me think about Smithson’s Asphalt Rundown – a truckload of hot asphalt dumped down a ravine, this sweetly fucked up move. Or watching his film Spiral Jetty and being overwhelmed with long, slow-mo takes of roaring diesel engines, huge machines billowing black fumes, tractors pulverizing and dumping load after load of stone, helicopters cutting up the air while circling the spiral – all this aggression played out within an immaculate landscape. The assault becomes even more aggressive, more forceful, and more punk when contextualized against the historical backdrop of rising, almost militant, environmentalism. In this sense, Smithson’s work embodies an ethos that is so blatantly counter to a pervasively liberal, socially conscious mentality. I’m curious how you think about all this in your work that often uses objects of warfare: compound bows and gauntlets, swords, armor and guns leading to this exhibition with burnt and melted yoga mats – an action when perpetrated on a body-sized artifact like a matt – one can’t help but sense violent undertones.

TIMUR SI-QIN



Violence is a theme that is hardwired in us to be relevant. The reason violence and romance are such dominant themes in narrative and entertainment is because they are innately relevant themes to us as biological replicators, e.g. natural selection and sexual selection. What I find extremely interesting in activating these evolutionarily relevant themes is that they provide us with information about the deepest questions one can ask: Who are we? How did we get here? Because truthfully there was a real way that the past happened in order to form the present and influence the future; namely, the universe evolved via causal, historical, and material events.

So in that way the dominance of violence as a theme in narrative can be seen as the fingerprints of evolution itself. The faint cosmic afterglow of all that has happened before.

MICHAEL JONES MCKEAN



Yes, I totally agree. When we zoom out far enough, all the details of living, all the crisscrossing minutiae of day-to-day life get swallowed up and absorbed by causal, almost predictable sequencing. Subtle textures of life suddenly look pre-determined, our choices silently administered by precisely metered chemical spills in the brain – chance becomes an algorithm. So when we feel the sensation ‘love’ – this palpably real bond to another – we’ve slipped into ancient, alchemic communion with our ancestors lured into the beginning stages of an unbroken continuum of procreation that the emotion ‘love’ (or the chemicals that induce its sensation) has tricked us to enable. Or violence as it has been sublimated into sports and feats of risk and peacocking – still by and large wedded to sorting out gene pool selection. As a model, in its consistency there is something totally reassuring about acquiescing to something primordial, causal, genetic. But I can’t help but flip it, or at least try to make it more personalized, local, wayward. We build a life out of an aggregated chain of brief moments: anxieties, sensations, dreams, conversations, objects, choices, people, carnal pleasures.

Getting more specific, if we can use violence as a pivot, I like to think about the subtle inflections, the huge spread of tonality in the way cultural producers decide to represent violence to us and in doing so, tell us very different things about ourselves in the process. So Spring Breakers and Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3D and Django Unchained or Haneke’s Funny Games all depict violence, but they report to us in vitally different ways, so much so that even as the subject matter of each film may have something to do with violence, the actual carried-away content of each film is vastly different. I’m curious about this in your work, so even if love and violence might be some of the themes operating more globally in the work, the objects come to us delicately, metaphorically, materially – bound to their own internal logic.

Timur Si-Qin

Timur Si-Qin

TIMUR SI-QIN



I think violence is somehow fundamentally about confronting the body with it’s own materiality, however I think it’s interesting that violence comes across at all. After all it’s only a single sheet of PVC plastic that has been burned. But through memory associations we relate the plastic to bodies and people that have been materially compromised in some way. I think that tenuous connection from concrete to abstract thinking is fundamental to the way art is processed.

But coming back to what Michael was saying about determinism and causality. One thing I think should be pointed out is that determinism does not preclude free will. In fact completely causal systems whose complexity passes a certain and (low) threshold will behave in ways that cannot in principle be predicted nor computed. Yet these same unpredictable complex systems (which most systems found in the real world are) are still highly structured displaying deep and elegant patterning. Just think of the patterns exhibited in plants and animals (which happened to be the last subject of study of the brilliant Alan Turing before he was driven to suicide for being homosexual in 1950’s Britain). This simple fact about causality leaves plenty of room for free will, which itself is an emergent adaptation of life. It is why nature is so beautifully patterned yet inherently unpredictable.

PABLO LARIOS



I think it’s interesting that you guys have touched on the symbolic potential of violence – violence as association, as material, that is, as a sign. In a way, this is a theme that’s linked very closely to evolution. “Violent” objects – whether artworks or artifacts from nature – might seem marked as falling on either end of the same temporal spectrum. I mean simply that there’s a weird temporality implicit in this scheme. Take something like a warning sign: it points forward (if you do X, Y will happen), proleptically; whereas something like a broken windshield points backward (analeptically, X has occurred). Maybe these serve specific functions on the evolutionary scheme: the horns of certain animals – surely as symbolic as they are functional – vs. the ritual stigmatization of objects of violence (the “spoils” of war). Beware the horn for what could happen; avoid the spoils because they already are stigmatized.

I would argue that there’s not only a temporal split here, but also a subject/object split: the subject of violence points forward, into the future, whereas the object of violence points backward, into the past, as victim. Clearly there’s a certain tribalism/primitivism in these dichotomies. Some of this might seem ‘problematic’, dualistic. I still think it’s worth it to explore. I still maintain that our choice of examples is slightly humorous.

Maybe primitivism is the dark side of any scheme that relies on evolution. Maybe a ‘lighter’ side is how this relates to anthropology. One might see evolutionary schemes as much in something as benign as table manners as in the typology of warfares.

Timur Si-Qin

Timur Si-Qin

TIMUR SI-QIN



Can you clarify how subject/object and future/past implies primitivism?

PABLO LARIOS



It might not: I just think it’s interesting that the setting for our discussion is a kind of primitivist landscape, with its talks of violence, evolution, and nature. There’s an interesting legacy of artists adopting primitivist frameworks, and I’m interested in pressing you guys on this a bit. It’s not necessarily the dualities (subject, object, future, past) that imply primitivism, it’s the color of our metaphors, the language with which we approach the works. One might also say that it’s not strictly a regressive primitivism, but the temporality is split: it’s a primitivism that implies the future as well as the past, a kind of techno-primitivism.

In a way, the burnt yoga mats in your exhibition invoke a fitness-ready positivism, an embrace of the eating, sex-driven body you mention; the presence of charcoal suggests a desire and necessity for foodstuffs, but in the most base commercial form (“no lighter fluid needed”); the decapitated head, the color grid existing in a kind of – I agree this is all complicated, tense, and contradictory. The temporality of these pieces is both medieval, at times – the head looks like a kind of war trophy – yet indelibly tied to the way we can imagine our futures. These contradictions are not crinkles in our thought; they are constitutive of it, they are markers for the tense and opposing modalities in which we imagine reality in general. So we have it that your works look both futuristic and medieval, just as the deep sea looks like a version of outer space, and outer space looks like a TV show; certain Egyptian pyramids look futuristic (the imagery of the Vulcans in Star Trek clearly draws on this). Isn’t this role-reversal a sci-fi trope anyway? I think of the cave like, Neanderthal-era imagery in The Matrix Reloaded (the fictional city called Zion), or the pervasiveness of our association of alien themes and native American themes (in the X-Files, say): both contain colonial narratives and stories of historical abduction.

TIMUR SI-QIN



The thing I’d like to point out is that the methods by which objects are interpreted is largely a priori to culture or ideology. The tenuous link to violence that a burn mark on a sheet of plastic makes is most likely the byproduct of a neural architecture that has been in development for millions of years. As the evolutionary psychologists Tooby and Cosmides point out this would explain why in popular media things like attacks by predatory nonhumans, chase scenes, physical violence and blood revenge are so over-represented even if they are no longer a part of and even counterproductive to everyday life.

I think when it comes to the question of why casting art in terms of evolution or evolutionary psychology is important in the first place. I would say that to do otherwise is almost a kind of myopia on the becoming of humanity, or even worse a sort of post-modern creationism. Evolution is the only known causal mechanism by which functional relationships can arise that are more highly ordered than chance. And since our bodies, minds and societies belong to this set, it’s safe to say that everything shaped by humans is ultimately shaped by the events that shaped humans themselves.

Along with the purely philosophical necessity of an evolutionary lense comes a framework from which to understand and analyse artworks, artists and even the art market in ways that more entrenched art historical perspectives are unable to do. Questions such as why art occurs in all human cultures, or why art can stir strong emotions in the first place, since emotions are evolved to signal that something is important to an organism. An evolutionary framework is non-arbitrary and, dare I say, true. As true as the fact that we are related to all other life forms on earth.

MICHAEL JONES MCKEAN



Going back to where Pablo began, the subject of primitivism is really interesting, I just have trouble investing in a style of thought so classically reductionist, so binary. I’m curious how one might build a working model that instead seeks out complexity as a driving ethic – one that embraces a more kaleidoscopic, long-view of events and objects and materials. In terms of a long-view, I can see how primitivism (and I’m really curious about this term techno-primitivism which seems to flank primitivism-proper in a more satisfying way) might be a convenient way into the discussion; especially one that until now has largely focused on violence. But violence as we’ve been discussing it is really just a proxy for a whole set of ancient baselines that stay close to us through time, acting as central pivots. So, over time our tools change, but the impetus to make new, more effective tools does not. The norms and ethics around sex, sexuality and procreation continue to change, but our desire to have sex does not. The food we eat and the techniques used to prepare our food shift with the times, but the need to consume foodstuff does not. Through medicine and genetics we are living longer, but we still confront death. The styles of our dwellings change, but the basic need for shelter is fixed, and on and on… These could seem primitivistic to some, but to me feel way more complicated, fraught, contemporary, and ultimately more realist in its perspective – more ontologically independent.

Very much related, I feel its important to press you, Timur, on evolution as an agent potentially leading us out of a post modern stalemate – I think its really exciting on many levels, but also can feel forced, synthetic – unable to completely service a world with substances as well as sentient beings. Moreover, as a model it seems to prematurely duck-out against a rhythmic progression toward maximum complexity – some kind of ad-hoc Omega Point – one that our continuum of modernisms, each one a corrective for the shortcomings of the last, seems to chart for us; an evolutionary process in and of itself. The success of the evolution-meme shows us that it continually satisfies, giving us enormous security that our world is patterned, inter-connected and distantly knowable. Yet counterintuitively, in its thirst to show us the origin depths of all being, to sweetly explain universal causality, evolutionary thinking seems only able to satisfy us superficially as people. For it to be real, useful, evolutionary thinking should be an option within a larger network of thought models – a kind of synchronistic, see-through, meshwork of tools and ideas. The trouble is, as viable options are shelved in favor of a single unifying rubric, things begin to sound like religion – but religion in drag. All this is to say, evolution is a consistent, reliable drum beat, but not really music. Or, as a lense it can deftly describe how things are, but never begin to describe how things feel, or appear.

Michael Jones McKean

Michael Jones McKean

TIMUR SI-QIN



My interest in evolution has two primary entry points and maybe by disambiguating them I could hopefully address these very good issues Michael raises. The first entry point is evolution as an umbrella term to refer to the fundamental morphogenetic process and potential of the material world. Going beyond the domain of biology, this slightly more abstracted idea of evolution is based on the recognition that like biological evolution, change itself is a form finding process. The change in matter, in information, in stars, universes, quarks, dogs, memes and crystals all occurs through the morphogenetic potential of matter. What unifies the change in all these things and validates the use of the blanket term ‘evolution’ is that their morphogenesese are the results of causal form finding processes just like, and identical to, biological evolution. In fact it is causation itself, the simple relationship between cause and effect, that underlies and unfolds into biological evolution as well as all pattern in the universe. The very same process that sculpted the stars also formed DNA, Humans, Operas, and Opera houses. However, whether one believes in causality or a mind-independent material universe in the first place is another debate at the heart of philosophy, the debate between ‘realism’ and ‘idealism.’ The validity of these positions ultimately rests on which side of this debate one lands. If the structure and patterns of the universe exists outside of our minds, before and after our lives, then evidence tells us that universal form finding processes underlie the formation of all matter and experience in the universe. If the structure and patterns of the universe do not exist outside of consciousness then the very notion of evidence is called into question.

Post modernism as a fundamentally ‘idealist’ philosophical position arose as a need to counter the meta-narratives of modernity. Religion, fascism, colonialism all committed atrocities in the name of their respective meta-narratives. Post modernism, as a reaction, abolished the notion of an ordering meta-narrative and in doing so abandons the notion of a mind-independent objective universe: there are many subjective truths none more true than another. But from the standpoint of realism, this was an over-correction in response to modernity’s failings. A conceptual safeguard that functions with the premise that in order to prevent a false claim of truth (and by extension its consequences), the very notion of truth is abolished, or to a softer degree, access to truth is unattainable. To back up this claim is the idea that since no-one got it correct in the past no-one should claim a truth today, e.g. nazis, copernican revolution, etc… That science or the measure of truth is a construction much like religion or any other worldview. But just because the geocentrism that Galileo challenged was untrue, does it mean that Galileo’s heliocentrism is equally untrue? The problem this argument faces is that it is based on inductive reasoning (e.g. All swans we have seen have been white; therefore all swans are white). It also abandons the idea that truth can be approached, or resolved even in degree. Which renders unintelligible the predictive capacity of science and the ever increasing degree to which materials can be manipulated.

The second entry point into evolution comes from the need to bridge this more cosmic and philosophical notion of morphogenetic causation to art. If one holds a mind independent, causal reality to be true then how does one address the morphology of art? Since art is a product of artists and specifically the thoughts of artists, and artists are humans whose brains are as much a product of causal material evolution as are their thumbs, then evolutionary psychology is the realist-materialist bridge between the morphogenetic potential of matter and art. Evolutionary psychology is more a lens than a branch of psychology and is according to evolutionary psychologist David Buss:

“based on a series of logically consistent and well-confirmed premises: (1) that evolutionary processes have sculpted not merely the body, but also the brain, the psychological mechanisms it houses, and the behavior it produces; (2) many of those mechanisms are best conceptualized as psychological adaptations designed to solve problems that historically contributed to survival and reproduction, broadly conceived; (3) psychological adaptations, along with byproducts of those adaptations, are activated in modern environments that differ in some important ways from ancestral environments; (4) critically, the notion that psychological mechanisms have adaptive functions is a necessary, not an optional, ingredient for a comprehensive psychological science.”

I think this last premise might speak to the point that Michael makes about the evolutionary lens as “an option within a larger meshwork of thought models.” Or rather that it is not an option given a realist-materialist understanding of the natural world. However despite its necessity it also does not necessarily negate other tools or thought models either, with the understanding that tools and thought models themselves are a product of historical, biological, material and causal form finding processes. I hope this explains how an evolutionary lens is not a replacement of other tools of thought, but a necessary foundation to thinking about the natural world, which we and everything we experience are a part of.

Resistance to the idea of an evolutionary lens may come from some misunderstandings about evolutionary theory itself. Misunderstandings that equate evolutionary theory with eugenics or social-darwinism which are misunderstandings of evolution themselves. Take for example the notion of survival of the fittest. The idea that natural selection ordains the strong to dominate over the weak. Fitness in the biological sense does not necessarily mean strong or physically fit but instead refers to the differential reproduction of genetic traits however that may happen. A lion is not better or stronger evolved than an earthworm, instead they are independently and equally evolved for their respective environments. Another misunderstanding of ‘fitness’ is the idea that there is one perfect ‘fittest’ solution and it’s imperfect copies. In contrast evolution requires variation in order to function. So if one were to imagine evolutionary solutions they are never a single perfect individual but rather a dynamic population of variation. There is no perfect platonic zebra and many imperfect copies, instead there is a constantly evolving variable population of zebras in dynamic interplay with their environment.

Timur Si-Qin

Timur Si-Qin

MICHAEL JONES MCKEAN



You covered a lot of important territory, and for the most part I don’t disagree at all with what you’ve laid out. These ideas are so clearly defined to the point of being non-negotiable – like arguing against the grid as a capable compositional device – it just works. My issues stem from limitations the concept imposes on modeling full-bodied, and at the risk of using your word, truthful registrations of thingness – one where more sleepy, mezzanine levels of reality are called upon to occasionally do some heavy lifting. Take for instance ‘glare’ – glare is very real, everyday, and glare of course exists as something mind independent – its reflective, gleam exists whether or not you or I are around to bare witness. But even with all of glare’s here-and-now qualities, evolutionary doctrine has trouble supporting an interesting, holistic, and faceted philosophy of glare past addressing our eyes and minds as evolved sensory organs capable of perceiving glare, or millions of miles away gravity churning particles into light-projecting producers of glare; or why even suggesting the study of glare might be a beneficially adaptive trait. Yes, sure, but by adapting a strong-arm causal position through the backdoor we shutter-away millions of mezzo levels of information – information that is real but that exists below, adjacent, lateral, inbetween, or just plain outside of causality.

If a working philosophy (perhaps neo-materialist) is to take hold, it doesn’t actually behoove us to edit these levels out because they’re unpleasant or don’t play well within the elegant organizing systems we have designs on. It starts to look like weird intellectual orthodoxy, something strangely totalitarian given the hardscrabble plurality we are emerging from. But more accurately, and maybe worse, the governing logic of any organizing system puts into motion an operational style that slowly erases the possibility of producing rogue structures – in this case extinguishing the very possibility of, say, exploring the intelligence of glare. Here, the editing happened not because we manually pressed delete, but because we couldn’t even see the ships. This is where a mind independent reality – and perhaps old school realist-materialist ideas find a functional limit – because, of course, Columbus’ ships were real.

Maybe all this is too far afield. I wonder if we can dovetail the discussion back to art-making, using it as a basecamp to model some of what’s in the air. This surge in evolutionary thinking to me seems attached to something larger, an upswell of burgeoning ideas that for me bring into focus many good things. So pivoting off evolutionary thinking’s baseline de-anthropocentrification, nearby we might find Speculative Realism or its nerdy brother Object Oriented Ontology. We might also find strains of Techno-Animism, (maybe the cousin of Pablo’s techno-primitivism) like an iMysticism bubbling up from our inability to see, or intellectually grasp the overwhelming complexity of everyday systems and objects (from how my iPhone receives Wifi signals, to a massive meteorite breaking apart over Russia, to the compression strength of neoprene, to the unseen cancer causing agents in eyeliner remover). The backdrop to all this of course being the Internet which asks us to ever more fluidly toggle between a screen-based world and an object based world giving rise to New Aesthetics or Whatever Aesthetics and on and on. Here, art making becomes an urgent, and in many ways a strangely utilitarian, polymathic tool able to build-out some of these ideas – not just offer up more illustrations.


Credits


Images Timur Si-Qin, Love & Resources, and Michael Jones McKean, The Folklore
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